The MSU research group, at the Center for Microbial Ecology, is one of the 16 teams that makes up the Astrobiology Institute of NASA, whose sole purpose is to search for life on other planets. The project is funded by NASA.

Hector Ayala-Del-Rio, associate researcher at the MSU Center for Microbial Ecology, said the group is looking for a bacteria, called psychrobacter because the organisms are better adapted to live under the conditions found in space.

The experiment is headed by James Tiedje and Michael Thomashow, two professors who recently have been inducted into the National Academy of Sciences.

To conduct the research, the team must find permafrost, soil that has been frozen for more than two years to simulate the conditions in space, Ayala-Del-Rio said.

"If we don't start understanding organisms in our planet, then we can't pretend to understand organisms out of our planet, no matter how similar they are," said Yahira Baez-Santos, a member of the team.

In 1976, NASA sent an expedition into space to search for life on the Martian surface. The astronauts brought back fossils that gave way to the possibility of extraterrestrial life, but the results were inconclusive.

Baez-Santos is an intern from Puerto Rico's Universidad Metropolitana, which is a member of the NASA Astrobiology Institute and has been researching at MSU since the summer.

She has been developing a method that can be used to detect psychrobacter in Puerto Rico and other tropic environments where the bacteria normally isn't found.

Soil samples were brought over from Puerto Rico to compare with 2 million to 3 million-year-old permafrost samples from Siberia.

Baez-Santos discovered the bacteria in early November and said she was overjoyed by her findings.

"Hector and I were screaming, 'We found it; we found it,' when we found psychrobacter in Puerto Rico because nobody that we know of has ever found psychrobacter there," she said.

The discovery already is being implemented by her colleagues in Puerto Rico, said Lycely Sepulveda, assistant professor for the Department of Science and Technology at the Universidad Metropolitana.

Sepulveda has been working in close relation with the MSU research group since 2001.

The research for the permafrost has been going on for five years, but the results are still too premature to be used by NASA.

"In the future, we will like to perform similar experiments on environments with no gravity to truly mimic the space environment," Ayala-Del-Rio said. "But we have to understand as much as possible from the microbe under earth conditions so we are ready to deal with the new dimension of zero gravity."